Somebody told the view from the Bangor office that the seasons are changing this week.

Bird flying over autumn trees

Return of darker (and colourful) skies

Heledd didn’t regret getting off the sofa to go for a drive in the dark to catch the Aurora.

Photo showing the Aurora night sky

Digitising forms

As part of National Customer Service Week 2024, Defra held a session on Digitising Defra forms. Since they have a lot of experience in digitising NRW forms, Lucinda and Sam were keen to listen in.

Defra’s team gave a demo of the Digital Express Toolkit (DXT), a form builder they have developed to create standardised forms.

It’d clear that we face similar problems when converting forms from paper to digital.

They said:

  • Defra’s paper forms are inaccessible, badly designed and expensive
  • Defra’s digital delivery mechanism means it’s very difficult, time consuming and expensive for Defra group to engage with and attempt to digitise their forms and services

We too still have many paper forms on our website, and we also face difficulty in getting engagement from busy teams. We started converting paper forms to webforms in early 2020 and it’s become very clear that paper forms cannot be input into a form builder like-for-like. We have to look at the service as a whole.

Reflecting on our own form builder and how we are able to use it, we think we are in a similar place functionality-wise. DXT responses are currently set up to output to an inbox, but they are looking to provide new features in the future which help push the information into the relevant back end systems. They also don’t yet offer a payment option, but are looking to integrate GOV.UK Pay around early 2025. This is very reflective of our own ambitions for forms in future.

Map of a form builder showing an online form

The webinar finished with a nicely chosen quote:

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection – Mark Twain

Why does customer inclusion matter?

Also as part of Defra’s Customer Service week, Sophie joined a call about customer inclusion- focusing on overcoming the barriers users face and to hear more of their real life examples in this space.

We collaborated on a word cloud to anonymously share our individual understanding of inclusion and what this means from a legal and practical perspective.

A wordcloud showing what inclusion means to the people in this call, with words like services, equity and vulnerable users appearing often

Considering inclusion at every stage of building a service is the only way to make a truly efficient service. Ensuring our customers can self-serve by mitigating the barriers they face in digital design can reduce customer calls, frustration with web services and provide a better experience for everyone.

DEFRA shared how they group barriers as either soft or hard barriers that prevent a user from completing their task. Some of the hard barriers include access to the internet, finance, evidence and digital literacy skills. Meanwhile, soft barriers could be things like a user’s emotional state, awareness, self confidence and trust in the service.

Photo showing the barriers to digital inclusion

It’s good to see how other organisations have been making changes to adhere to government policy around inclusion. Some of us are excited to sign up to CDPS’ Access for All - Building an Inclusive Wales event in November.

What the website is for

Sam and Lucinda have started thinking about how to better communicate what we do as a team and the purpose of NRWs website. One of the ways we thought we could do this was by recording a training session.

We want to the training to:

  • give colleagues a better idea of how the public uses our website
  • know when to come to us and when not to
  • spread awareness of how we work

Using a Mural board to ideate on what message we want to get across we started adding post its under the headings:

  • who are our users
  • what do they want to do
  • what do they not want to do
  • what the website should not be

This gave us a nice opportunity to experiment with Murals AI capabilities.

Here is an AI produced summary of our post its: Our users include NRW staff, homeowners, businesses, community groups, citizens, sole traders, anglers, ecologists, developers, farmers, water companies, job seekers, and solicitors. They visit the site to check flood risk, register for waste collection, manage permits, check fishing rules, get licenses, report incidents, and request data. Users do not want to spend excessive time, get lost, or decipher complex information. The website should not reflect the organizational structure but should help users complete tasks efficiently, without the need to hire consultants or understand internal jargon. It should not be a library, archive, or intranet but a place for current information, focused on external user needs.

Not a bad summary at all.

Screenshot of a Mural board

Scoping with customer and data teams

This week, Heledd facilitated a session to gather around a problem we’ve wanted to tackle for a long time:

We estimate that 60%(ish) of people that contact the organisation by phone and should be able to self-serve. We’ve known this for years – from user research, spending time ourselves listening to calls, and speaking with colleagues.

But how can we make it easier to spot and make more confident decisions about where we focus our improvements and measure future impact?

Together with colleagues in customer and data teams, we started with gathering what we know, our assumptions, and things we’ve got questions about.

  • We make it easy for people to call us
  • There is an appetite to use the data to make better decisions
  • The digital team cannot get easy access to call and email data
  • We need to capture the customer’s voice, not our interpretation
  • Data is held in various systems - and isn’t joined up
  • Customer hub colleagues are crucial to helping improving services - they know their stuff/ insights into what users’ need
  • We don’t know if all the data we may need is actually even recorded - basically we have to be careful not to infer incorrectly

Screenshot of Mural based on School of Good Services course materials

Screenshot of Mural based on School of Good Services course materials.

MuralAI summarised the current state of this problem as:

“The organization faces several issues with data quality, including duplicate data, disjointed systems, and lack of access to call and email data for the digital team.

Data categorization is subjective and inconsistent, often involving manual input into CRM systems.

Despite having tools like PowerBi and Dynamics, these are underutilized, and large amounts of data remain unused.

There is also a lack of data on customer needs, missed opportunities for website improvements, and insufficient tracking of offline vs. online service transactions.

Although customer hub colleagues have valuable insights, these are not fully leveraged. Multiple data entry points exist, but there is inadequate information on why customers contact the organization.”

Best part of was hearing the different perspectives and expertise we have within #TeamNRW. Weirdly, this isn’t something we get to do enough of.

Finished the session on a hopeful note from Henry (one of our data gurus) – “it’s not as complicated as we think”. Cool, we like the sound of that.

Paper forms – many unknowns

Thanks to a day in the office, and hearing and seeing a bit more of the day to day activities of other colleagues, Heledd found herself opening a new (old) box of worms –paper application forms.

Our colleagues in the Customer Hub print and post around 10 forms a week for people to register for our waste carriers, brokers and dealers (one of our highest used services).

There are several other forms that are also regularly printed out, posted, and returned to us by post.

This is an area we have very little insight on, and a place for future research to understand more about the barriers that people face to accessing online services.

photo of a paper form

Braving the cold for our new laptops

This week, James braved the office to get his new laptop sorted. Not one to waste time, he found a quiet corner in a break out room to write a new discussion guide for user research. Great work James!

picture of james in the welsh government office

More watery and regulatory web updates

Shaun published a new form and web-page for surrendering a sheep dip permit. This was previously covered under surrendering a water discharge permit but changes to the way we process these requests has necessitated a dedicated form for sheep dip.

Amendments have also been made to ‘Registering your septic tank’, ‘Apply for an Environmental Permit for water discharge’ and ‘What to do if you have been refused a free registration for your septic tank’.

Shaun and Alex met with the Regulatory Business Management team to discuss improving the way we provide information on our charges. We’ve decided to investigate incorporating information from the EPR charging scheme into our dedicated regime based charging pages. We’ll start off with installations charges to see if the idea is viable.

Shaun also worked on ‘Decommissioning a large raised reservoir’, which should be winging its way to translation as these week-notes go to press. A little puzzle for grammar enthusiasts and content designers: Large raised reservoir would normally include a comma between large and raised however the subject matter expert has requested this be omitted as ‘large raised reservoir’ is a defined legal term and (in their words), not a list of adjectives. I’m torn on the issue – does the fact it’s a legal term mean we can ignore normal convention?

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • James is preparing to hold 12 user interviews about species licensing in the next fortnight
  • Sophie has had a busy week of publishing, updating links and content across the website. We have a feedback form on every page that allows users navigating the site to let us know when they find an inconsistency or broken link. This direct feedback is helpful for us to know what customers are looking to do when they visit as well as any problems that occurred, which is all great insight for our team.
  • Sam made changes to the cockles licence return form
  • Kim and Sam had their first session to explore how they can help colleagues with creating accessible strategy and plan type documents
  • Lucinda has been working on a new feature for the flood warnings service ‘send a test message’.